Thursday, January 10, 2008

Should the Bucks promote Sessions?

I don't know what kind of an NBA player PG Ramon Sessions can become, or if he even will become one, but I do know he's currently tearing up the NBDL. In fact he looks very promising, indeed.

His point guard adjusted Win Score with the Tulsa 66ers is an excellent +4.25. He penetrates, dishes the ball, and minimizes turnovers. His low scoring efficiency worries me (.451%), but I think if he came up he would show a lot of discretion. He may be overshooting in an effort to get noticed -- a smart strategy given the way the NBA overrewards scoring (and yet his bad shooting is not killing his WS, which tells you how good his secondary numbers look).

But how will his NBDL numbers translate if they bring him up to the Show? That I don't know. But I'd sure like to find out.

Playing Royal Ivey is a complete waste of time. The Bucks are getting nothing from him. In fact, its worse than that. He's so far below average he's actually a corrosive force. And its obvious, the more you play him, the more damage he does.

Night after night the Bucks are actually having to overcome his lousy play to win. Why not try the young guy?

Worrisome College Numbers

The one thing that frightens me about Sessions are his mediocre college numbers. Normally that indicates a potential flop.

However, again, I think what happened was Sessions tried to force the points in an effort to get to the pros. If someone gets in his ear before he gets to Milwaukee and tells him to take only high percentage shots, he should be fine.

Oddly, Sessions NBDL numbers are far better than his college numbers. I wonder if that's common.

2 Comments:

One thing that stands out is unless you find a vagina in the bathhouse like Jared Reiner, almost any tolerable big guy is already in the bigs.

As for what effect that might have on Sessions' numbers, his FG% is the same as last year (goood), he's up a full rebound (makes sense), assists are up but A/TO is better than last year but not as good as his soph year (all right), and he's shooting almost twice as many free throws now (hmmm).

But I haven't seen any Tulsa games so I don't know how much more easily penetration might be coming in a league of guards and forwards, or how it plays into his playmaking or the translation to the NBA.

How about some more in-depth on Ivey? Jim and Jon were loving on him tonight, but I hate that he's a marginal guard who still never got around to getting good at free throws.

Also, how much can WinScores account for the little things that don't show up in stats, like some of what Simmons has been doing recently?

Big Men: No, I like this other guy down in Tulsa that Dallas has the rights to. Big Guy from Nevada.

Sessions: Its hard to assess the correlation between NBDL and NBA, because NBA.com takes down player's stats as soon as they go back to the show! P's me off.

Win Score: It only takes into account the tangible statistics that correlate directly with winning. It can't account for intangibles.

The thing I've been wondering is: is there a defensive Win Score?

And, I think Win Score fails to fully account for what I call "Scoring Reliability".

I haven't fully developed that thought, but here's the essence of it. Some guys can sneak around and make a high percentage of baskets living off the garbage of others. But you can't build a team around such guys... there's no one to live off of.

I think there's a value to a guy who can not only make shots, but make a lot of them consistently. I just don't know how to measure it, or how to express it.